Some Brisbane Guy

My Dad and I went with some friends on the 2007 Camp Quality esCarpade rally. We’re still in Tasmania as I write this but we’re heading back on the plane tonight — thank the Lord we don’t have to drive all the way back to Queensland.

The 2007 esCarpade started in Canberra and Dad drove down from Brisbane with Ray and Tracie (they’re from Gympie and supplied the car) in our HZ Holden Kingswood rally car “The Red Baron” with its 202 Holden motor (3.3 litre), Commodore 4-speed gearbox with sticky linkages, flashing orange lights for dirt roads, knobbly dirt tyres and big steel boxes on top for luggage which you need because the boot fills with dust when you’re bashing down gravel roads.

Everything was going great until before the rally had started when on Thursday arvo, 150km out of Canberra the old six cylinder started spewing oil all over the place and making some unhappy noises. They limped into sunny Canberra as gently as they could, where the esCarpade organisers gave them the number of a top bloke named Charlie of Hughes Mechanical, who were also the support team for the “Ours” esCarpade team. This guy was awesome and the lads worked their asses off until late in the night to get a new motor into the old beast and have it running again for scrutineering the next morning!

So the team managed to enter the rally with a new motor and I was airlifted in Friday night so that I could be there for the start of the rally on Saturday morning.

We headed off with Tracie at the wheel and the old Kingy seemed to be running sweet as a nut until we noticed some banging noises underneath the back end, and it started wagging its tail like a dog over any kind of corrugations. Tracie held on through some hairy moments as the car waggled around on the gravel and we started to think something could have been wrong. We stopped for lunch and had a quick look but everything seemed fine, and then it was my turn to drive.

We were pretty convinced something was pretty messed up under the back of the car as it tried to swap ends any time the road got bumpy and it was scaring the crap out of all of us, and embarassing us too as pretty much every other car in the rally flew past us and we were eating their dust. So we stopped and jacked up the car and we didn’t even have to take of a wheel to notice that the passenger side shock absorber was just hanging around and had snapped at the top where it mounts to the chassis. That explained a few things…

So once again the car was limping to Canberra after every car parts shop in Yass was closed. Repco in Canberra weren’t keen to sell us a pair of shocks over the phone by credit card and they were going to close before we got there, but some desperation, harassment and cajoling eventually convinced Brian to take our credit card over the phone and leave our package of salvation out the back behind a rubbish bin. Then it was Charlie to the rescue again, he put the car on his hoist and had the shocks changed in literally ten minutes and we were driving on with smiles on our dials.

Heaps and heaps more stuff happened on the trip with plenty of cars having mechanical dramas, navigational problems and driving indiscretions, but it was heaps and heaps of fun and in total all the cars raised over $917,000, which was nearly two hundred thousand more than 2006. A top effort.

So now the plan is to build up a car of our own, get some sponsorship and go again next year. Should be awesome.